POST problems

[bekeland]

Using NT 4.53.  I've had an ongoing problem that I would like to get fixed.  I am POSTing to two separate websites (PayPal and UPS) and most of the time everything works.  I POST, I get the return data, life is good.  But occasionally I POST but I don't seem to get anything back.  All of these POST's have something to return and the servers I'm posting to get the request and swear to me they are sending the response.  I log my request and as soon as I get a response I log it.  But there are times, especially with UPS, my log shows the request but no response.  When I log into UPS, the data I should have gotten shows 'read', like they sent it, but I didn't get it.  This has just been a nagging problem that I've tried to work around, but would really like this to work consistently.  Any ideas as to what may be going on or something I should do differently?  Thanks.

Brian Ekeland

[kevin plummer]

Hi Brian,

if you want it to be 100% then I would add a flag in on the Request and on the response. If you don't get a response then issue the post again.

Cheers,

Kev

[bekeland]

Kevin,

That won't work in these situations because on the PayPal side the POST is charging a customer.  I don't get the response to tell me successful or not, which it usually is successful, I just don't get the data telling me so.  There I have to request a transaction history to find out if it worked when I don't get the response.

On the UPS side, the POST marks the data I need as "read", so doing another POST returns "no unread files" message.  Here I have to manually log into UPS, see what files are out there and compare to the list I'm keeping of what I've received and either download them there, or I can request them by file name, once I know what the file name is. 

So these outside servers are getting the POST request and PayPal especially is adamant that they are sending the response.  So that's why I'm thinking there has to be something with the NetTalk side that is failing when it should be receiving this data.

Brian

[Flint G]

Brian -

When you set up a proxy or a traffic sniffer, can you see the response coming back from PayPal and/or UPS?  If it's coming back and it simply doesn't make it into NetTalk, that's one thing.  But I suspect it's not making it back for another reason all together.

If it were me, I would try to set up the proxy/sniffer first, and watch for the response.  If there's no response, I would try to find a way to mark my transaction in the database as "pending" and then write another process that will poll PayPal / UPS for history.  I would then match up the history with what I have in the database and update my database appropriately.

We have to do a similar thing with our CC processor, so we can reconcile our transactions if the user chooses not to "POST" back to our site.

Hope this helps!

Regards,
Flint

Sniffer: WireShark http://www.wireshark.org/
Proxy: Fiddler2 http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

[bekeland]

Flint,

I think I will have to give the sniffer a try.  That will be a lot of data to wade through but that's a good idea to find out if it is even making it to my server for NetTalk to process.  I've used Ethereal in the past but will give this other one a try.  Thanks for the links, very helpful!

Brian